Two stories in the Guardian grabbed my attention this morning.
One is a report on Sajid Javid's car crash interview on Covid yesterday. Twitter was full of medics despairing as a result of his comments. That was unsurprising. In the face of a rapidly growing number of Covid cases, hospitalisations and deaths Javid appealed for people to take precautions, knowing full well that his own behaviour, that of the Prime Minister and most especially that of his colleagues in the House of Commons suggests that not one of them thinks that any precautions are required to tackle this wave of Covid when it looks more likely than any previous wave to overwhelm the NHS.
The political message was three fold. First it was one of denial that there really is an issue. Second it was one of denial of responsibility on the part of the government if there might be an issue, even if the government denies that there is. Third, it was to pass the blame firmly onto the public if matters get worse, even though the government is actually not demanding any change in behaviour from them.
The anger from informed commentators in the face of this indifference to risk was justified. The current R rate for Covid is estimated to be only a little over 1. The disease is spreading exponentially in that case, but not (thankfully) at too high a rate. The point is important. What this makes clear is that relatively small measures could now push R below 1 and begin to slow the spread of the disease. Compulsory face masks, encouraging working from home and requiring social distancing may well be enough, although all would of course have an impact on social gatherings.
But the government won't require these things. What it is saying is that it will not ease the pressure on the NHS. It will not take the steps necessary to ease the suffering of those waiting for NHS treatment. Nor will it prevent avoidable deaths. In the face of crisis it will do nothing.
The second story shares this theme. As the Guardian has noted, on Tuesday a note from the Number 10 nudge unit was published as part of the net-zero package of announcements. It said we would need to change our behaviour to meet net-zero. The usual things were mentioned. We would need to eat less meat, consume less energy, fly less, and so on. All are absolutely true: they must happen if we are to have any chance of meeting net-zero targets. As the Guardian noted:
The document said it would be extremely important to ask for public behavioural change: acceptance of changes to policy and infrastructure; willingness to adopt new technologies; and direct individual action.
As the Guardian then noted, that report has now disappeared from the web. The government said of its mysterious absence:
This was an academic research paper, not government policy. We have no plans whatsoever to dictate consumer behaviour in this way. For that reason, our net zero strategy published yesterday contained no such plans.
Yet again, the government is saying it is not for them to hear experts and to act on their advice. It is instead for the public to decide.
This is, of course, classic populism. Experts are discounted by populism. They are the elite. They are to be ridiculed and blamed. They are to be made the subjects of hate as the government seeks to divide society. But whatever happens their opinion must not be acted on, whatever the harm might be from ignoring them. In the land of populist equality, Jo down the pub has an opinion that is just as important, and if they say eat steak and guzzle diesel, well that's just fine with this government and sod the consequences so long as they still vote Tory.
I think it time to say that the era of Enlightenment is most definitely under threat. Maybe it is drawing to a close. A very Dark Age is starting.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
It seems that Savid Javid and his deputy health minister are in complete denial of the scientific and medical data regarding Covid management. They won’t admit that even after 2 inoculations there is not 100% protection and that the efficacy for 6 months plus after the second reduces considerably. I tested positive just before the 6 months after the second inoculation, fortunately only had a severe cold and flu-like symptoms, and am now almost back to normal. They don’t admit that the non-take-up of inoculations is a problem and that 80% or so of hospitalizations and intensive care cases have not had any vaccinations and those anti-vax fanatics are spreading wild propaganda on social media and the government is doing nothing to stop this. Or that infections are spreading like wildfire from school children and the tardiness of inoculating 12 -16-year-olds is a major problem let alone the difficulties schools have with little support to ensure adequate ventilation, social distancing, etc. The government is not admitting that the “roll out” of booster jabs is woefully behind schedule and that in “world-class” terms the UK is the worst OECD nation in dealing with Covid. The lack of government honesty and accountability certainly is the beginning of a dark age unless radical ameliorating actions such as compulsory mask wearing and social distancing in public places are taken now.
It’s sounding like a quite deliberate cull to me… and that paper from the nudge unit; I suspect the poor will be expected to eat less meat, consume less energy etc but you can bet your boots the wealthy won’t be. We’ll be expected to eat chemical gloop masquerading as food, vastly more profitable than meat for the makers, in the name of climate change but again, the wealthy won’t be. We’ll be expected to use less energy but the wealthy won’t be. There’s your great reset for you, simply more inequality.
Not so much a deliberate cull, as ‘these people really don’t count’. This might provide an insight: https://aeon.co/essays/why-longtermism-is-the-worlds-most-dangerous-secular-credo
I agree with this totally.
I might add: an issue is I (and I suspect many others) don’t trust the process that deems a person an ‘expert’.
You are clearly an expert in accounting and tax due to being a chartered accountant for many years in reputable firms doing complex work for complex clients.
Many people claim expertise in fields beyond those in which they were actually trained and have been independently and rigorously assessed.
I got my qualification 39 years ago
Does none of the intervening 39 years not count towards expertise?
Why not?
If a person’s designation is self assessed by their own experience, then anyone can call themselves an expert in anything.
At that point, nobody can be sure who is an expert and who isn’t.
I am not casting aspersions on your own claims to expertise. I don’t know much about your experience beyond what you have published on this site.
My point is that once it becomes ‘self assessment’ for anyone, then you can’t be surprised when people don’t trust the process.
Who qualifies politicians?
Nothing, other than they are eligible to stand and they get elected according to the rules of the contest (in this country, first past the post, different rules elsewhere).
Elected politicians don’t get their legitimacy from being ‘experts’. They get it from the process of being elected.
You aren’t required to have expertise in anything in particular to get elected, and indeed, it is a good thing that they aren’t all necessarily experts in the same thing or in anything in particular.
I’m glad there are politicians in there who, say, do not have university degrees, or who have devoted a significant portion of their adult life raising their children. Part of the tapestry. But they aren’t expected to be ‘experts’.
Why don’t we expect them to be experts?
Because:
1. Keeping the barriers to entry as low as possible enables wider participation. A good thing in itself.
2. Who gets to be on the committee that decides what areas of expertise are valuable and which are not?
3. Can people self-assess their expertise on the grounds of experience? If so, wouldn’t everyone just tick that box, rendering the process meaningless?
Who gave the power to the Guilds that certify experience to prevent market entry and keep profits high?
I am playing devil’s advocate by the way
I simply think your characterisation too narrow to be useful
It has some merit
But it is pointless to ignore that experience life can provide
Candidly, I thought Phil G argued his position well. I do not agree with him because I think there really is a necessary tension, a complexity here that is rarely acknowedged, still less addressed, and cannot be rationalised away; a tension between expertise and democracy that may seem obvious to us now, only because of the bungling, cynical, incompetent and self-serving nature of the current British Government. Their hubris overtops their judgement to the point that they flaunt their sense of electoral invincibility, and even their indifference to failure. Failure has become the hallmark of success; a pitch that is so much easier to make than finding solutions to real problems; thus government has become almost wholly a matter of commanding the ‘agenda’ and the ‘narrative’, and packaging persuasively the plausibly preposterous for public consumption: it has nothing whatsoever to do with managing an efficient or effective Executive, bothering about the intricacies of good governance, or of furthering the common good. In truth the politically active electors so far show slight evidence that any doubts they may have in the idea that failure really is success, has registered signifcantly with them in any way.
Expertise is vital, but nevertheless we allow politicians to make the political decisions, for good reason. Removing our awareness of this inner tension between them has been a central purpose of Neoliberalism. It is not an accident that Neoliberalism attempts to depoliticise politics by turning political decisions in the economic sphere into matters that should by decided by tehnocratic, quantitative answers that appear indifferent to politics or human judgement, or social relationships. The purpose is to make highly ideological, pro-neoliberal decisions look entirely apolitical and value-free. Problems of a political nature that touch on deep human values are reduced to a calculation, a formula; solutions even to essentially insoluble problems of value, are offered by turning them into automatic, routine quantitative processes that require no intervention by human wisdom. Solving problems becomes formulaic and stress-free. They appear unbiased because they are abstract. They do not proclaim the neoliberal ideology that framed the formula. Neoliberal economics is a form of quantitative anaesthetic.
It is not a matter of whether democracy (and I shall here pass over how ‘democracy’ is best delivered), provides the wisest governance, but the recognition that the fragile idea of democracy is all that separates us from the triumph of tyranny of one kind or another. Nor can democracy ever be the tyranny of the majority; but that raises profound constitutional issues that are beyond a brief comment of this kind. Generally the vigilance of a committed electorate is all that ‘holds the line’ aginst tyranny. Electorates, however are rarely vigilant. The other side of the coin is that democracy does not prevent electorates making really, really terrible choices; both by the politicians they elect or through the policies they approve, that for the electorate amay, and often does mount to serious self-harm, whether they ever come to realise it, or not.
Exactly, my PhD is in Physiology. But my research was in Developmental Biology. Which is attested by my corpus of publications.
Unfortunately most people can’t read them as they’re behind a paywall. But I can link to it.
That should be enough.
I (and I suspect many others) don’t trust the process that deems a person an ‘expert’
Used to run power networks, used to issue “permit to works” to men to work on high voltage networks. If they died, due to a failure on my part, I was personally responsible = jail sentence. I still design networks, based on industry standards. Does that make me an expert?
Problem is, most people don’t know enough and explaining the intricacies of how power systems function is very very difficult and very very time consuming (ditto finance etc etc). Wrote an article for the Greens on local energy – tried to make it as simple as possible – still been asked to simplify. Maybe if people spent a bit more time trying to understand important stuff (rather than “Strictly”) then they would be in a better position to decide who is an expert and who is not. But the reality is that it suits the current “gov” (I use the word losely) for the population to be passive/passified and ill informed. Sewing doubt on “experts” is part of that & indeed has been the case for crica 1000 years.
I had an article rejected for this reason quite recently
They tried to edit it
I refused to put my name to the edit
So we gave up
I disagree with the amount of weight put on ‘experts’ and their opinions. External accreditation leading to recognised ‘expert’ status may well have value and is arguably of more consequence than someone declaring their own credentials, however to me that is entirely beside the point.
What matters to me is not someone’s job title or what a certificate on a wall might say. It’s not even necessarily about their years of experience in the field. What matters to me is whether what they say on any given issue is correct or not.
For example, Arthur Laffer is extremely well qualified and acted as an expert economic adviser to the US Government. He was also totally wrong about his chosen field of expertise.
Greta Thunberg was unheard of and hadn’t even finished high school before she was universally recognised as a leader of thought in her field.
Hi Mike.
Might the problem be that the modern world is so complex now, that to understand any small bit of it, people have to go down some very deep rabbit holes.
MMT and government financing is a good example.
When we don’t feel that we understand how our world work, we feel anxious. Latching onto sound bites and popularist retoric makes people feel better. Like they can kid themselves that they know what’s going on.
That’s the power of conspiracy theories. The people who believe in them think they know the truth and the rest of us suckers are being conned.
The simpler things are put, the easier they are to understand. Unfortunately, a simple explanation of the modern world isn’t going to explain anything.
Yes, let’s ask the people to decide. I always ask a random stranger in the street or a bloke down the pub for legal or medical advice, rather than a lawyer or a doctor.
Let’s abolish laws that govern road traffic and trust people to make their own decisions about the mechanical condition of their car, which lane to drive in, whether to obey any road signs, whether to use a mobile phone or wear a seatbelt, and and how fast to go. What could possibly go wrong.
Nonsense on stilts.
The government are looking at the data. And ignoring it.
To his credit, Patrick Vallance was on the Life Scientific recently. He said that government scientific advice should be published automatically and immediately so everyone can see it. It should not kept confidential or held back.
Advisers advise and ministers decide, of course, but it needs to be very clear when ministers are ignoring the evidence and overruling their scientific advisers.
Vallance should quit and turn Queen’s evidence
I think it is striking that the French Minister of health is a qualified doctor – and what is Javid qualified in ? How to shovel money around and into the pockets of the rich ?
Which is exactly the point – a certain kind of expertise is desirable. The kind that makes it easier for them to line their own pockets.
I know that, in this example, the Tories have some MPs that are medically qualified, but, as far as I’m aware, France has a different system of cabinet appointments to the UK. The prime minister can choose whoever they want as a minister. They don’t have to be elected to parliament, so the prime minister can go for the expertise they believe is required
Many countries use that system
So long as accountable to parliament I do not see the problem
My view is that there is something really quite evil and callous at work here.
And its wealth.
I’ve always worried that as MPs pay has risen, their perceptions of life have changed and they think more like certain minority sections of the population and play to them in order to promote their own longevity and garner support. Everyone else it seems can go to hell.
Any other Government would have collapsed under the criticism that has been levelled at this lot.
But somehow, they defy the gravitas of their shortcomings and attitudes.
But so did Tory Blair – the war criminal and latter millionaire. You can tell that he has been enriched so that he could prepare the way for George Osbourne and then this lot.
Our politicians have been captured by wealth for some time.
It’s just that now, there’s no hiding it.
Many of us may not live to see better times.
But things go in cycles don’t they.
All those lessons that the rich and society learnt the hard way may now be forgotten for maybe hundreds of years.
We talk a lot about money on this blog, but I’m beginning to see it as a rather malignant thing – life will be short and brutish without enough of it, but also callous and indifferent with to much of it.
A new age of extremes beckons.
Watch out for the announcement that the government is considering introducing a bill to legalise euthanasia. All in the name of freedom and progress, and it should help reduce the costs of social care!
The Tory government can do what it likes without fear of any consequences. The population has to get used to high levels of infection, high levels of road traffic collisions, dangerous levels of air pollution, ever higher concentration of plastic in the sea and CO2 levels that have triggered climate instability. They are in control and such is their level of cynicism the vast majority accept that we just have to get used to the new normal.
There is a crossbench private members bill not a government bill – Baroness Meacher’s Assisted Dying Bill has its second reading in the House of Lords today. https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2875
Personally, I think it is about time for something of this nature, with appropriate safeguards, but (like abortion) it should be a matter of conscience not a political football.
As regards Covid. Delays in approval of Novavax for use in U.K. and outright govt cancellation of Valneva vacc are threads in need of investigation. Both vaccs are proven more effective than favoured U.K. vaccs in use and safer for both shielded group and others yet kept unavailable through U.K. govt inactivity or activity. Novavax has links to Barnard Castle pharmaceutical site (Cummings links) and Valneva is a French company (AUKUS links). Two obscure and probably productive trails to follow the political and money interests of. Both Novavax and Valneva were also scheduled to be safer and more effective booster shots. One has to be suspicious about delays and cancellation when U.K. pharma players have financial interests in the favoured vaccs.